Business is booming at HyTrust, a maker of policy management and access control software for VMware virtual infrastructure, and whistleblower system admin Edward Snowden, who revealed the National Security Agency's web-spying PRISM project, is doing his inadvertent part to pump it up even further.

Elon Musk has been dropping hints about a revolutionary form of transport called Hyperloop for over a year, and on Monday he said that the full details will be released on August 12, and that the system's key technologies will be open sourced.

Dino-boffins have found a Tyrannosaurus Rex's tooth embedded in the spine of another dinosaur, a find that confirms the creature was a predator but calls into question just whether it was really as fearsome as has often been imagined.

The Internet's big brands are volunteering to try and withhold advertising dollars from piracy-related Web sites, and have linked arms with the White House's Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator to promote a no-ads-for-pirates scheme.

Intel's Thunderbolt I/O protocol looks just a little less likely to threaten USB's status as the world's preferred way of connecting stuff to computers, after Acer decided it can't be bothered using it in PCs any more.

A successful speed-of-sound shot has powdered ten tonnes of ice, but much to the builders' delight the projectile used managed to retain its components and internal structure in spite of the massive g-forces involved in the test.

Antique Code ShowThe summer months of 1998 have gone down in history as the period in which Larry Page and Sergey Brin took their PageRank web search engine technology and formally founded a company around it. They called it Google.

AnniversaryBefore the internet, local area networks were the big thing. A company called Novell was the first to exploit the trend for connecting systems, ultimately becoming "the LAN king" with its NetWare server operating system.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has described NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as an unwanted "Christmas present" from America - and hinted that the cornered geek, still hiding out in a Moscow airport, will stop leaking details about US internet surveillance programmes.

IT services reseller Computacenter has pulled back the curtains on its operations for the first half of calendar '13 and clearly hasn't been affected by any unexpected dramas. But while its UK business is progressing, trade on the continent remains mixed.

In a bid to get out from under the billions of dollars in subsidies it pays to smartphone and tablet manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung, AT&T is instituting a plan it calls AT&T Next, in which you pay the full price of the device yourself in 20 monthly payments and have the option to trade it in after 12 months for a new device – and, of course, a new monthly commitment.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have applied an IQ test to MIT's ConceptNet 4 artificial intelligence system, and determined it's about as smart as a somewhat-challenged four-year-old child.

Amazon's relentless campaign of price cutting has forced a response from one of its rivals, with Rackspace arguing that price is not the sole factor that should matter when choosing a dedicated cloud instance.

Moving applications from your data center to a public cloud – a process generally called onboarding – requires a lot of manual setup of the public cloud and tweaking of the operating system, middleware, and application software to make the jump. CloudVelocity, which came out of stealth mode in December and which is now shipping the first iteration of its One Hybrid Cloud tool, wants to automate this entire process.

IBM is getting out of selling education and training services to customers for its Software Group and Systems and Technology Group, and shifting to an indirect sales model through a new training channel that it has set up.

Microsoft has written to the US Attorney General asking him to let the company be more open about what information it hands over to the NSA, and has published a rebuttal of the claims from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about the privacy of its users.

Every so often a press release passes by The Reg's gadget desk which just begs to be filed away and checked against future reality. Today's example: the market-watchers at Canalys ("Insight. Innovation. Impact.") predict that over five million smartwatches will ship worldwide next year.

Yahoo!'s earnings for the its second quarter of 2013 roughly matched analysts' expectations, and CEO Marissa Meyer says she's "encouraged" by the company's performance. Revenue, however, continues to be a problem for the troubled firm.